Blog

2018 FAFSA Bug Affects Single Parents

Posted on 10.9.17By Steve Stanganelli

Last year’s FAFSA was complicated by a concern with identity theft that shut down the automated IRS Data Retrieval Tool (DRT). THe 2018 FAFSA has a bug that affects single parents. This is a new error that has been discovered in the FAFSA 2018 – 19 form. The FAFSA became available on October 1. The FAFSA Bug for 2018 – 19 affects single parent filers and is currently a problem. This would include parents who are divorced, separated, never married or widowed.

In the 2018-19 FAFSA, the father or mother question was used by mistake. Since there is not a second parent the question should not have appeared. In the 2014-15 FAFSA, the FAFSA form went gender-neutral due to a lawsuit. The references in the FAFSA to parents should be Parent 1 and Parent 2.

The problem occurs when the person is trying to use the DRT system and the mother is selected. Under gender-neutral rules, you should select the first parent since it should be titled Parent 1 and not Father. We are awaiting verification from the Department of Education. The system is processing the mother as the parent 2, which does not exist in this case. It will not match the IRS system and FAFSA system will continue to process.

For single parent FAFSA filers, I would submit the FAFSA manually and not use the DRT system. We will keep you informed, once we have more information or the DOE corrects the problem.